Abstract

A key element in the explosive growth of virtualization is the ability to drive the physical server hardware to higher, and more cost-efficient, utilization levels. With that in mind, it is important that server resources are not wasted by overly demanding antivirus (AV) solutions. VMware’s vShield Endpoint provides access to VM resources via a virtual appliance rather than by requiring agents on each VM.

Sophos commissioned Tolly to evaluate its Antivirus for vShield v1.0 solution and compare its performance to two other vShield-based offerings: McAfee MOVE Agentless 3.0 and Trend Micro Deep Security 9. Tests encompassed a range of VMware ESXi5.5 Microsoft Server 2008 virtual server applications including a web, database and file services. A virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environment with 120 Windows 7 Enterprise virtual machines on a host was also evaluated using a VMware View Planner 2.1 standard workload.

The Sophos solution demonstrated consistently better performance and, by inference, lower system resource demands than the McAfee and Trend Micro solution.